Monthly Archives: January 2012

Bogus Booths

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One synonym for booth is stall, which is what a trade show booth should do. At Mac World last week, very few booths made attendees stall. The purpose of a tradeshow booth (or any promotion) is to make attendees believe that you have something of value to offer. Well targeted trade shows provide great opportunities to put value propositions in front of potential customers, many of whom have thought-leadership roles given that in this recession they are the only ones with budget to attend shows. Yet an average trade show booth rarely communicates more than the booth manager not understanding how to nail audience attention. When planning to exhibit, you have to ask yourself “what attracts the attention of this group of people.” At Mac World, my wife noticed a cluster of highly attractive women in tight fitting and very abbreviated dresses at one booth, and instantly realized their ability … Continue reading →

Al Natural Splits

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Start-up founder eyes cross when I ask “what is your segmentation model.” I often must resort to CPR to revive them. It is not that the concept is unfamiliar to them. Nor are they shocked into stuttering zombies due to weak mental stamina. It is that segmenting markets is unnatural to them, and often practiced in aberrant ways that make politics look savory by comparison. It is the unnatural aspect which throws both novice and veteran entrepreneurs. Image using industry verticals to segment the iPhone market, and you’ll instantly understand why some segmentation models are unnatural. (Brief war story: I once consulted to a firm that had a huge IPO, and then saw their basic business model crumble. During the initial consultation preparing them to enter a new market, I asked “What is your market segmentation model?” They reported it was based on industry verticals, which seemed odd to me. … Continue reading →

Content Overload

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Have you had an overload of content yet? Don’t worry … you will. For all the great things our Internet enabled interconnections have given us, we pay by receiving gobs of completely useless content, most of which is apparently generated by green marketers and my Facebook friends. The number of bytes per second received by today’s average wired human now exceeds the number of bytes per second sent by all the world’s mainframes in the 1960s. Marketing content — especially HTML layered ads — is devolving into poorly targeted noise that is more aggravating than accepted, according to Content Blossom. People are tuning out in the same way they learned how not to watch TV commercials by 1958. Advertising noise has always been problematic for marketers, and the Internet in some ways is making it worse. Since marketers are responsible for much of this noise, they are creating their own … Continue reading →

Doubtful Differentiation

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“That’s a dumb differentiation,” was what one bootstrapped founder said to another after both their investor pitches plummeted. Differentiation, the unholy grail of product marketing, shows that most people have unrealistic notions about what it is. In pure form, differentiation is anything that makes your product different. In practical form it is the difference that causes people to buy your products and not ones from your competitors. Just because your product is different doesn’t mean anyone wants it. Indeed there are three basic things that can be called differentiation. A product or feature can be different from everybody else’s, it can be better or it can be new. Yet, just because your product/feature is different doesn’t mean anyone wants those differences. Just because your product/feature is better doesn’t mean that people need it to be better, or you may not be ‘better enough’ to motivate customers switching to your offering. … Continue reading →

Failing Innovation

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Avoiding bad markets is half the battle. Annually I see multiple software vendors pitching products designed to improve the performance of computers, databases or networks. With few exceptions, these tools disappear within two years because the underlying commodity (computer server, network connection or DBMS) becomes faster and cheaper. One of the most common technology and marketing mistakes is to create a product for an industry that will inevitably correct the problem. Take home Internet connections (please, take mine and bring me FttP). Long, long ago — about 20 years back — having a 4,800 baud modem for connecting to the Internet was considered state of the art and painfully slow (recent college CS graduates may have to look-up archaic words like ‘baud’ and ‘modem’). Without fail, once every quarter, someone pitched a software solution for raising the data transfer rate across antiquated telephone technologies. The following quarter a faster modem … Continue reading →